One of the portions of my job as an academic is to secure funding to enable the research that I would like to happen to be done. I'm lucky to find myself a member of a project that has been funded under the AHRC's “Digital Transformations” banner: my colleague and office-mate Tim Crawford [*] (once part of the Early Music revolution, late of The Parley of Instruments) is leading a team from a number of Universities in a three-year project in “Transforming Musicology”.

The project has multiple components; among other things, we'll be looking at methods for digitizing and interrogating historical source materials, including manuscripts and printed music, as well as relating those to modern performance artifacts; we'll be looking at the perception of music in context, trying to understand the compositional use and listener recognition of leitmotives (as in Wagner opera, but also in film scores); and we'll be trying to characterise the effects that social media, broadly considered, have had on the production, consumption and study of music itself.

On this last point, I have funding available for a PhD studentship. The award covers University fees, and provides a tax-free stipend (starting at £15,700) for three years, at the end of which the expectation is that there would be a sufficient body of research to write up as a dissertation for the award of a PhD. The full advert has all the details, but broadly I'm looking for someone who is sufficiently interested in the topic of music and social media to work at it for three to four years, has good computational knowledge and skills (Common Lisp programming experience definitely wouldn't hurt, but isn't necessary) and has training or relevant experience in music or social science. Does that sound like you? Please apply now! (Not sure? I'm happy to discuss the studentship or the project with anyone: just send me an e-mail).